OS 5.0.0.680 OS for the Bold 9700 Findings & Fixes

Being honest, I was thinking that I'd stick with the .656 OS until 6.0 was released. .656 was relatively bullet proof and did a good job for me. I really had no complaints.

Then yesterday I get a Twitter alert that the new .680 had been released. I don't think many of us saw this coming. There hadn't even been a leaked version of this OS. All of a sudden, there is was kinda totally out of the blue. I briefly toyed with the idea of downloading it right away and walked away saying that I didn't really need to worry about this release.

Well there I was last night watching TV and not really finding anything worth watching on the old tube. Well boredom got the best of me and before I knew it, I was downloading .680. Well, why not huh, I've used every other OS for the 9700? Before I knew it, .656 was a memory and .680 was on the job.

In my first day with .680 I can't really report a lot of significant changes. But then it's rare to see major differences between one OS version and another these days.

It seems to early to tell, but so far, here's what I'm finding.

Fonts: The fonts in this OS seem slightly smaller and more consistently the same size. I seemed to find the fonts in .656 to be slightly bigger and some different than others. .680 seems to be smaller and more uniform. Obviously the font issue is not a big deal one way or the other.

Memory: I pretty consistently had 135 mb of memory available with .656. Running the exact same programs, I see a small loss of memory with .680 and now seem to have around .131 mb.

Battery: .656 was an "ok" battery manager. Not the best, not the worst. Because it takes several days for the battery to settle down after an OS change, this is really too early to say for certain but .680 seems to manage my battery pretty good. I'm in the late afternoon and have 90% of my battery remaining after an average day of use. Not bad. We'll see if this continues to track to that standard after a few days of use.

Boot Time: .680 is not a champ here. It seems that this new OS takes about 20% more time to boot. This is not a crucial problem for me but it seems worth reporting.

Nothing really else to report. All apps work fine. No problems to report. No significant feature changes to report either.

Worth upgrading you ask? Check back with me in a couple of days. If the battery management continues to perform as well as it has today, then it probably is well worth upgrading. If not, then 656 is probably good to stick with too.

Hi dbone. I know .593 was widely applauded my many as a good bug-free OS. My run on it was short-lived and I reverted briefly back to .586 before jumping over to .656. The problem with .593 (and this is a complete dealbreaker for me) was the lack of speaker support in Visual Voicemail. When I get voicemail, I leave my 9700 on my desk playing my voicemail while I take notes. I am unwilling to live with an OS that requires me to hold the phone to my ear while listening to voicemails. I know there was some sort of a Rube Goldberg fix to this that was found where you cou;d activate the speaker by going into some menu options but that simply was ridiculous to me. So .593 was a "no go" for me.